Falling Forward
by Trinity Archangel
Summary: Piers suffers physically and emotionally prior to and during the events of Resident Evil 6. Her name is Sheva.
1. LIFE LINES

The radio clicked on the moment the digital numbers on Piers' alarm clock radio rolled over to the hour. A country and western song was fiddling softly behind the crooner's southern twang. The sun had broken just a moment before Piers opened his eyes. He was in perfect sync with the sunrise even when he wasn't under obligation to be up so early. He came alive with a yawn and a jutting stretch that imposed his dozing partner's sleep space. She shuffled, trying to pretend she wanted the sleep that was no more in her than it was in him.

"Get up," He commanded softly, flopping onto his back and closing his eyes. When she didn't respond, he rolled toward her, smoothing a caressing hand over the landscape of her body. It was familiar terrain: every curve and bend, every dip and dimple absorbed into his passing fingertips until it settled to cup the shoulder that was nearest to him. He leaned into it and blessed it with a warming kiss.

A smile eased across her face.

"Get up," he grumbled into her ear, taking her lobe in between his teeth. There had been an earring in it last night. She didn't respond.

He pinched the thin sheet covering her form and slithered it down to her waist. When it dared to dive past her hips her hand shot out and stopped it, driving it back up over her shoulder.

"Come on," he coaxed. "I want you to see it."

"Oh, God, Piers," came the muffled reply. "I've seen it all before."

He gave her a playful shove. "Not like this." He threw off the sheet and boldly strode across his bedroom to draw back the curtains in a grand unveiling. Sharp orange sunlight rocketed into the room, forcing him to shield his eyes. Immediately warmed with heat his partner got up on her elbows and squinted over at his silhouetted form against the intruding sun.

"You've _really_ got to consider repositioning your bed."

"Yeah, maybe." He came back over to her and sat down on the bed, bunching the sheet between his legs as he clasped his watch. "So, what did you think?"

He watched her arms encircle him around the waist and lock her fingers in his lap. He felt her kiss in the small of his back. It ticked up his spine and raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

"About what? The sunrise?" She poked her head out from behind him to see his face. "No offense, but I've seen better back in Africa."

Piers shook his head and bent down between his feet to pick up his cargo pants. He found her black boy shorts and offered them to her. When she reached for them he crumpled them up and threw them across the room playfully. It dropped before the menagerie of her things sloping out of boxes throughout his bedroom. He hated to be unkempt. It didn't seem to bother Sheva that she hadn't made the slightest effort toward settling in.

He got a disciplinary smack on the back for that.

"That's for putting down my sunrise." He popped up off the bed just enough to slip his pants up to fasten it.

Sheva rolled up onto her knees, pulling away the remaining sheets tangling her in the bed. He was hand brushing his hair when she appeared next to him, sinuously rolling her leg across his lap to straddle his hips. She pressed her bare chest up against his, enticed by his accelerating heartbeat rippling across her body. She smiled against his lips, crossing her hands behind his head and melting into the arms that fastened her to him.

"Three months. Eight days. Thank you." She cooed.

From their first kiss to present, they had always kissed like lovers. Sheva kissed him every time like she would never see him again. She had drawn him out of a military stoicism with her alluring smile and telling eyes. She had intoxicated him, bared her insecurity without a hitch and lured him into a sense of comfort he had scarcely known before. She made him audacious. She made him possessive and somehow made him feel needed, though she bore a sense of inner strength that he suspected she could remain standing in his absence. Why did she want him?

He cupped her face in his hands and wove his fingers into the hair at the base of her skull. Although he was the sniper he felt locked in the crosshairs of her hazel eyes, alight with anticipation of his intentions. His hands wandered south to settle at her hips. She knew he was getting deployed. He never spoke about his targets or bragged about the successes of his missions. Reading his case files was usually enough to get her distraught even after he had come back. So they never talked about them. She would lay awake most nights staring at the far wall where his uniform was neatly pressed and folded over the walnut valet in the corner. She had been spurning it with scornful looks on her way to the bathroom all week. His preparatory custom only sent slithers of anguish up her spine when she saw it. He would never have to know what she went through anymore.

When the BSAA hailed for her, she honored the privilege. After Kijuju, her emotional trauma had brutalized her tenacity as a field agent. She had been contented to work behind the scenes, mobile within a small radius, a requested last resort. Then Piers Nivans entered her life, brawny, eager, dedicated to a fault perhaps, with his engaging green eyes and stylized brown coiffure: she had seen it for what it was—a deliberate personalization in a world of military issued crew cuts. The hair cuttery, an analogous "fuck you" to conformity seemed so unlike the usually quiet Nivans, who only boasted through his ability. It was enough to peak her interest, she was enough to keep his and before long her nights were plagued with sleeplessness whenever the BSAA heralded him.

Now she was thanking him. He wanted to say something to her too but it wasn't thank you.

"Shev," he sighed, pressing his head against her, his voice lost against her chest.

"Hmm?"

He mumbled something she didn't catch.

"What?" She gave him an encouraging peck on the lips.

He popped his head up to look at her, feeling the courage draining from him slowly. "I said I'll miss you."

She rolled her eyes in good nature despite knowing he had dashed another opportunity to confess the love he only showed and rested her forehead up against his. She took her other hand and lifted his own, rolling the tip of her thumb around his palm until she found his uppermost crease and traced it swiftly with her finger.

She frowned. "Humph."

Piers perked a brow. "What?"

"Short life line," She explained regretfully.


	2. When Everything Feels Like Nothing

Piers reached up to his eye and swept away the blurring that obstructed his vision. Sometimes he forgot to blink. He had been staring pointedly into the dimly lit window of a small favela just down the sloping street that seemed to plunge into the heart of the Brazilian slums, only to rise again into even more staggering towers of squalid living conditions with their once brightly coloured building sides faded and peeling amidst random pops of murals to break the monotony. The murals too had been defaced; if not by vandalism then by the crumbling foundation it was painted on. Piers himself had set his tripod in such a collapse with his folding chair nesting in the rubble of the rooftop. The slums of Rio were a drug addled stain in the seaside city where the shadow of Jesus Christ hid their sin.

With dusk coming, and the sprinkling of favela lights like twilight in the navy sky, it dared to look beautiful. Piers wasn't in the mindset to appreciate contrasting beauty.

Chris approached Piers from behind and set a careful hand on his shoulder. He barely lifted his head from his folded arms to acknowledge him.

He pulled his shemagh down from around the lower half of his face. "What's up, Captain?"

"Take a break," Chris returned gently, waving him away from the chair. Piers declined with a shake of his head.

"I'll take watch. Go take a leak," Chris insisted.

Piers relented with the prospect of an empty bladder- a bladder he hadn't even realized was full until he stood up stiffly into a stretch. He eased past Chris and found the piss addled wall downwind that had been chosen for the bathroom. It was two steps away from an ugly four story drop onto another favela rooftop. The support beams jutted out daringly from the frame, hinting at a collapse in time.

He took up a stray water bottle and rinsed off his fingertips, dragging down a tattered shirt from the clothesline that stretched across the rooftop to wipe his hands. He emptied the rest of the water bottle over his head and ran his fingers through his hair. His back was stiff. His eyes were tired. Still, he would rather go back to the scope.

He threw the shirt-towel down beside Chris, abruptly announcing his return.

"Alright, I'm back."

Chris leaned back languidly in the chair and set his boot up alongside the tripod to counterbalance.

"Seriously, hot shot. Take a break." He tucked his arms behind his head and watched as the scream of a nearby firework soared into the air and burst into purple sparks. They had been going off intermittently all day since Brazil secured a victory against Argentina for futbol finals. It was finally getting dark enough to see them. The streets were awash with celebration and an unknowing covert to the sinister operations being held in their midst. Piers glanced down at his languid Captain. It was a rare sight to see Chris Redfield unwound during a mission. It took the edge off of some of the anxiousness Piers was feeling.

"In and out mission, eh?" Piers teased, knowing Chris shared the same thought. He watched a smirk appear across his face.

"We still have 14 hours," Chris reminded in jest. Jokingly, to dispel the potential jinx, Piers reached under his shirt and produced a gold Lady de Guadeloupe necklace and kissed it, while Chris searched about frantically for a piece of wood. He reached over and took a swipe at Piers' ducking head when he came up short.

A crackling voice in their earpieces interrupted the light moment, sending both men to attention.

"Say again? Copy." Chris looked to Piers to see if he'd also gotten the transmission but he was already readying the rifle. The target had entered the area.

Chris stood up with his scope to give Piers back his seat and zoomed in on the target in question; a biological arms dealer who was making a transaction with a rendezvous in the favela Piers had already zeroed in on. The mission objective was simple: take him out, retrieve the sample. By the time Chris had confirmed the target himself, the transaction was over and the target was continuing his stride toward the exit. He would be lost in the stairwell in the next second.

"We're gonna lose him," he announced.

"I can make the shot," Piers returned confidently. No sooner than he'd finished his words, the shot rang out like a crack of thunder in the night. A second later, the target plummeted to the floor erupting in a geyser of blood.

"Hit," Chris confirmed. Piers really was an incredible shot, though Chris didn't feed his ego too soon. Experience had taught him to wait. A downed body wasn't always a dead body.

"Shit, he turned," He said plainly.

Piers immediately turned from the scope and snatched up his assault rifle on his way toward the roof exit and started down the stairs two at a time. Chris fell in behind him, hot on his heels.

"Engage with caution!" Chris warned, frantically trying to keep pace with the younger man who was moving like a shadow. Piers threw his shoulder onto the ground floor door to burst outside into the street, mixing immediately with curious nightlife setting off home-made fireworks.

Piers lost sight of Chris shortly after he left the rooftop. He was parting his way through lines of laundry and clutters of celebrators. The labyrinth of alleyways and sudden drop-offs had confused him the second he hit the street. The rendezvous point looked like it was just across the way from the rooftop. He should have known better. He followed shouts, running in the opposite direction some citizens were coming from and leapt up the stairs. This was the spot. He remembered seeing the pathetic urban garden outside the window flanked by a pair of dull lanterns.

He pushed open the door with the barrel of his rifle expecting to see a BOW but instead the customer the arms dealer had come to meet was on the floor, swearing in Portuguese and dragging his noncompliant lower half across the room with an AK in hand. The dead BOW pulsing its life blood onto the cemented floor seemed to have done damage in retaliation before expiring. The panicked arms dealers looked up at Piers and fired indiscriminately in his direction.

Piers scrambled back and shut the door on reflex but quickly found that the closed door did little to slow the bullets that thudded into his chest. He dropped like a sack of potatoes.

"Fuck! Piers!" Chris had seen him drop the second he placed a foot on the landing but had barely taken cover himself. He flattened himself against the side wall at the head of the steps, waiting for the familiar sound of the bolt catch locking open.

Piers was flat on his back staring up at splinters of wood and dust trails pass inches above him. He knew he'd taken a hit. He knew it. He glanced over at Chris along the side wall, a calming hand out to reassure him. It was difficult to keep calm once he realized that the swelling warmth beneath him was most likely his own blood.

The man in the room seemed to be emptying his entire magazine through the door. Finally, the gunfire stopped. Chris dove onto Piers and hooked his hands under his arms in preparation to drag him away when the door opened and thudded against his boots. Piers drew them up away from the door, both staring wide eyed at his assailant returning their startled look. He was trying to hold himself up using the rifle as a crutch. Without delay, Chris kicked at the anchor point, sending the man tumbling down next to Piers. He drew his side arm and put three in him before he lay still. He kicked away the gun the assailant still had clutched in his hands before dropping on his knees next to Piers.

"You ok?" He knew he wasn't.

Piers felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest. He couldn't even get in a sip of air before crippling pain forced it out of his lungs in a gust. He tried to tear open his shirt to expose his chest but his trembling hands weren't working faster than Chris'. Chris finally got his shirt open and found the clasps that latched at his side and swiftly ejected them, peeling over the tatters of his vest and lifting his undershirt to reveal three nickel sized bruises fanning across his chest and abdomen in a domino pattern. The body armor had mostly done its job but the chest plate had one huge crater that bulged out the back, crackling material all over his bloodied abdomen where only a faint bubble of air gave away the entrance hole.

Chris slapped a hand over the wound, trying to maintain a pocket of air while rivers of blood seeped between his fingers. He slipped his other hand under him at the exit wound to seal it. He could feel Piers' desperate eyes searching his face for answers he couldn't ask but Chris refused to look at him directly. He wordlessly activated the Distress Signal Unit at his hip and turned his attention to the skies, searching for the response to his signal among the fireworks.

"How bad is it?" He asked in a rush through clenched teeth. He found Chris' shoulder straps and tried to sit himself up. He was immediately restless with discomfort. Chris resisted him firmly.

"Relax."

Piers nodded frantically, groaning his way through an exhale, followed by a quick gasp that stole Chris' attention.

"This. Hurts. Really bad." He huffed.

Chris tried to stay calm, despite how immediately stupid this situation had rendered him. There wasn't shit else he could do for him but standby as seconds ticked away like dragging hours. "Shut up, Piers," he warned.

"Oh. Fuck." Another gasp. A series of quick, panicked breaths followed it, too shallow to be of any use to him. It hurt to breath. It hurt to move. Then in a few seconds more, it didn't.

Everything felt like nothing.


	3. Dread

Exhausted. Dusk met him on a rusty folding chair outside the barely functional hospital, somewhere, a stone's throw from absolute squalor in any direction, lacking the staffing, coding, sterility and upkeep of a modern hospital he had come to expect from the states. Stray dogs roamed in and out of the open main entrance, which consisted of a sheet of galvanize to reinforce the wooden door—swollen from sudden rain and structurally weak from termites. Dirty paw prints danced circles in the dark waiting room where ailing patients co mingled with the infectious.

The ruckus they made when the BSAA rescue team bulldozed into the tiny hospital clamoring around their fallen ally, barking demands in English that fell upon ignorant ears. One look at Piers and the nursing staff fell right into place to help them. The waiting room emptied to spy at the doorway to see what had sent the hospital into a panic.

Chris stood up stiffly and outstretched his hands to the steady drip of rain that was rolling from the leaky gutter and cupped the cool liquid in his hands, thankful for the respite on his blistered palms. He could hardly bend his fingers. He rubbed his hands together and watched the pink water runoff onto the street just outside the awning.

He spent forty minutes pumping an ambu bag to help keep Piers alive. When the mask didn't keep against his bloody mouth, he pinched it down and counted aloud to keep himself focused. Rag upon rag dropped to the ground in a bloody wet plop. Reaching this ramshackle hospital seemed like an oasis at the time.

Now that the rumpus had died down, the chipping aquamarine plaster, humming generator and flickering lights seemed insufficient. The rescue team had more antibiotics on hand than the hospital kept in the locked cabinet the size of a linen closet.

Chris found himself on the floor resting against the leg of Piers' hospital bed. They had shut him in a lazaretto with one screened window. A mosquito coil burned slowly at the sill. Above him, the chilling wheeze echoed rhythmically from the still breathing Piers. At least it meant he was alive.

Chris unhooked the sides of his tactical vest and pulled it up over his head. His compression shirt was speckled with blood. He drew his knees up to his chest and hung his head between them, trying to close his eyes for a few minutes of much needed rest. He was dampened with rain and sweat, sullied by blood and too tired to rise up and demand a chair to rest on. Falling asleep would be a miracle. He wanted to listen for when the wheezing stopped.

He looked up at the owner of the shadow that fell across him from the doorway. One of the attendants stood staring down at him with the sleeves to a sweaty blue uniform shirt rolled up to the shoulder. He had a cigarette balanced behind an ear and a missing tooth. He was part of the rescue crew and worked communications and had been trying to reach mainland USA for the better part of an hour through several unsecured channels. He knew him standing there meant success, though he was dreading making the phone call to Sheva.

The water had just come to a rolling boil when Sheva heard her work phone sounding off in the next room. In her haste to answer it, she absently left a dish rag on the stove top and nearly set it ablaze had she not returned to the kitchen when she had, swearing and flagging her oven mitt desperately to clear the smoke traveling toward the smoke detector.

She had a call coming in at the field office.

It didn't take her long to throw a jacket on over her over-sized sleep shirt and roll on a pair of sweat pants. The twenty minute commute had taken her half the time as she sliced through traffic, apolgising for her erratic driving and bold maneuvers. Still, she had unnerved herself by the time she got to the office and when she picked up the phone resting off hook in Communications, a breathless and halfway desperate hello caught Chris off guard. He had been holding for a half hour for her.

"Sheva, it's me, Chris."

Sheva felt the room spin. She was expecting to hear Piers' reassuring voice on the other end. Instead, it was Chris, and he sounded worse for wear.

Her voice came steadily though her heart was racing. "Where's Piers?"

Chris didn't know where to begin. He had picked up on the tint of panic in her voice despite her best efforts.

"He's ok," he started, hooking a finger under the base of the black rotary telephone and swinging it off the table. He dared to rest his weight on the stand it had been on. He hardly sounded plausible.

"What happened?"

"Gun shot wound. He's lost a lot of blood—" He was interrupted by a gasp. Sheva might have sucked in all the air in the room.

Chris continued. "We managed to stop the bleeding."

"Is he alive?"

"Yeah."

"Is he conscious?"

With each question her voice was rising.

"No."

She instantly fell silent, stifled with the news. Her fingers wound the coiled phone wire absently, tightening the pull she had to the phone on her ear. She felt it slipping the same time she caught onto the instability of her wobbling legs and with a decisive turn she managed to drop rather dramatically into the desk chair beside her.

"How long before an extraction?" She whispered, sinking her head into her hand.

"Not soon enough," he admitted in defeat, hating hearing the truth as it left his mouth.

"Should I be losing sleep?" She asked, not sure how else to wonder if time was a factor for Piers. The voice that had been rising in panic was now sinking with defeat.

Chris nestled the phone between his ear and shoulder to hold up his hands. His fingernails were down to stubs but the rivets of maroon blood caked between his calluses made him wonder if he had more blood on him than Piers had _in_ him.

"You will anyway." A crackle of static interrupted the line before a snippet of another conversation joined them in theirs. The communications leader wound his finger in the air to speed Chris along.

"I'd better get going. Pass along my status."

"Roger." She said flatly.

Chris hesitated a moment. "Alright."

He waited to hear the click on the other line disconnect their conversation. But it never came. So he set the phone down onto the receiver gently, wondering if her level response was due to conditioning, or if her composure was made of steel threads.

On the other end of the line, Sheva had only done a masterful job of shielding her emotions from her voice. Her face was damp with tears, and the moment Chris hung up her shoulders began to quiver. Her only connection to Piers had been severed. The phone she held clutched in a stupor hummed to her the certainty that he was gone. When her fumbling hand found the phone base, she but threw it down to clatter against the desktop. Whoever offered hands of comfort to her pitiable form went without ownership, their identities lost behind her own blurry hands, their voices awash in the torrent of her sobs.


	4. A Close Second

The last time Piers Nivans was in South America, he was eight years old and had taken to the lackadaisical village life of Pies de Dios, Venezuela, like a native. His mother had sent him there hoping to occupy his mind from sorrow. When he first arrived in his grandparent's village, he felt like a privileged American and had thought that with his name brand clothes and new shoes, that he would easily be the most liked child in the village. He was wrong. It was quickly discovered that he spoke very little Spanish and couldn't play "futbol" half as well as the other boys who could work over a makeshift soccer ball of old rags and rubber bands like it was an extension of self. He was more of an oddity.

It only took a few days before he had lost his shoes in a bet, and refused to wear a shirt in order to fit in, despite being lambasted with mosquito bites. Now he was balancing on his blistered toes on a cinder block, wishing he hadn't given up on his shoes so easily. He had tried to win them back, but it seemed like every child in the village had a turn to wear the shoes, whether or not it fit them.

The hole he was peering into had been tediously carved away by a flat piece of iron and was no bigger than a quarter. But it was worth the very last few cents in his pocket that amounted to little more than thirty-three cents American but the foreign coin managed to satisfy the curiosity of the peep- hole guard, Romulo, who accepted it with wonder and satisfaction.

As it turned out, Tati, Romulo's fifteen year old sister liked to sunbathe topless with her boyfriend just past the seawall that ended behind their house. It was the first time Piers had ever seen anything of a breast and didn't know he was interested in them until that very day. Invading on this poor girl's privacy and encouraging her own brother to capitalize on her intimate moments meant nothing to a loose jawed voyeur with his eyes stabled to Tati's breasts . It did not occur to him that he had exhausted his three minutes on the cinder block. He ignored the tugging on his shorts, then the slapping on his back, then the fists bounding against his bony, jutting shoulder blades. He brushed off the hands without turning his attention away from the hole in the wall.

A hand tore him from the cinder block in a spiral. He landed on his back, dizzy and confused. He could see his friends down the street putting distance between them by scattering in all directions. When he looked up, Tati's boyfriend was towering over him with his hands on his hips. Piers could hardly make out what he was saying to him. He stood up and brushed himself off. When he didn't respond, he ate a soul crushing gut punch that set him back on the ground again. His eyes welled with tears. His lungs burned like fire. He wanted to throw up his lunch all over the sandy green flip flops of Tati's boyfriend. But he didn't.

While he was regaining his senses, Tati's boyfriend seemed to have been joined by a few more of his friends, playfully admonishing him for flooring an eight year old. They set him on his feet and made him tag along with them on the beach. He spent the rest of the day with the older kids. They gave him his first taste of alcohol and his first drag on a cigarette. Tati gave him his first kiss, though it was only on his cheek, and she was wearing her bikini top again. It was a collage of orange and red and yellow in a triangular sunset over her small, round breasts. The turquoise nail polish on her toes had been ravished by the sea, and her bikini bottoms would slip and reveal unblemished skin that had not yet been kissed by the sun. He didn't understand most of what they were talking about, and he kicked the soccer ball into the ocean current so many times he'd lost count. It became sport for them to dive into the tide to get it before the sea carried it out. Every time Piers looked over his shoulder his friends were there staring from the sea wall, their arms folded under their chins in petulance and he would smile and hope that the last hints of setting sun would illuminate his wholly satisfied face.

The summer in Pies de Dios ended with a nonstop plane ride back to the states, where he was met at the airport terminal by his mother. He had been gone nearly three months and she still couldn't shake the depression of losing his father four months earlier to injuries sustained on duty. She swept him up into her arms and spun him in circles, but she was only feigning life. The long, loose black hair she let wildly frame her face was pulled back into a lazy pony tail. Frown lines had aged her a touch.

She remarried a year later to a drunk and when he wasn't drinking, he was sweaty, trembling and hallucinating, calling out to people who weren't there.

Old Joe had thick red whiskers that he curled at the ends, ten years his mother's senior. He was as aggressive as he was temperamental and demanding. Piers had no clue why he would marry a woman he constantly degraded. He spat in her pots on the stove if she dared to cook anything he didn't like or swept the food off the table so that she could pick the plates up off the floor. When Piers stood at the threshold of the kitchen and dared to look at him with anything he deemed as hate or a threat, he would pick him up by his hair and drag him around the house. Piers would whimper in his clutches as he smoked his way through a pack of cigarettes with no hope of releasing his grip and down a pack of beer before falling asleep on the couch.

It was then that Piers would ease out of his hand, leaving tufts of his hair behind and crawl into bed besides his mother. One night she stared at him from out of two blackened and half slanted eyes and slipped off the gold Lady de Guadelupe necklace she wore and told him it would protect him from harm if he prayed and believed. He had to do it because it didn't work for her anymore. He slipped it over his neck and never took it off again.

Then a man showed up at the door in tan fatigues with a shemagh around his neck. Piers immediately didn't like him because he was a military man and he had long since lost his fancy with the military because it took his father away from him. But it was hard not to like this man. He was the younger, less serious version of his father, tall with oiled black hair swept off to the side. He spoke like a Yankee but charmed like a Confederate. He claimed that he needed a place to crash since he had been discharged, and hoped that his sister-in-law still acknowledged him as family. He unwrapped the shemagh and dropped it on Piers' head and walked past him into the house.

Uncle Theodore or "Teddy" was a balm. Old Joe tamed immediately when he was around. Old Joe became "fuckin' Old Joe"-and Teddy didn't mind if Piers referred to him as such. He taught him how to throw a perfect spiral football though he was afraid he didn't know anything about soccer. He showed him how to tie the shemagh and how to shoot a rifle. He didn't drink much, he smoked less, and the moment Old Joe would flare up, Teddy would smile at him with a hopeful glimmer in his eyes and roll up the sleeves to his shirt. Old Joe would promptly leave the house. Sometimes for days.

One day, Old Joe never came back. Uncle Teddy left a month later, claiming he had found a place to stay. He winked at Piers on his last day, explaining that he had accomplished his mission and needed to start a life and a family of his own, so he could have a wife like his mother and a son like him.

Uncle Teddy never married, re-enlisted for eight more years, served four tours of duty and then died of cancer when Piers was seventeen. It was the second worst hurt he'd ever felt in his life.

Then a bullet eased into his chest and tore apart muscle and bone, flesh and pride. It deflated his lung like an old balloon. It threatened to drown him in his own blood. Still, it would be a close second.

* * *

At the doorway she stood, arms folded, unable to set more than a foot into the small room in which Piers occupied most. With all manner of equipment recently established taking up floor space, and what space did remain was dotted with his field gear and tactical bags that were either stumbled over or kicked out of the way. His sniper rifle remained dignified and upright in the far right corner of the room, as though observing the scene as keenly as she was. She glimpsed him through flashes of fast acting medical personnel, trading places and instructions or brushing by her with nary a pardon. It was difficult to accept the near lifeless form tangled in wires and tubing as Piers.

His face was dipped facing his shoulder, an expression of discomfort frozen in his features and in the way his body was drawn up to favor the side of the injury. He did not appear to be cognizant at any moment, despite the way his unconscious body naturally reacted to the opposing will of the staff on hand. It was really too much to know that at her last memory, his now ashen complexion was burning with passion.

She backed out of the doorway.

It was hours again before she could go in to him. There was barely a part of him that wasn't hooked up to a monitor. At least he was alive. There was a clear baggie on a rolling table by the foot of the bed with his personal effects in it. A sport watch speckled with blood, a folding tactical knife and the gold necklace his mother had given him. She carefully unwound the chain, straightened the kinks and latched it around his neck. Then she knelt at his side with folded hands and found her peace in the rhythm of his hissing respirator.

She had lost track of how long she was on her knees petitioning God but when she opened her eyes again Chris was staring into them from the doorway. He was patiently awaiting an invitation in with one hand shoved into the pocket of his sport pant and the other nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a somber expression. It wouldn't kill him to smile. She waved him in.

"Do you say your prayers in Swahili?" He asked tentatively, knowing she spoke several dialects. They had rolled off her tongue with ease as they transversed Kijuju. Listening to her switch back and forth between languages left an impression with him. He was no linguist. He barely credited English to himself. She nodded.

"Beautiful." It was a dual compliment. She made the sweatpants and t-shirt she had on look like it was on a store front mannequin.

She swept away the remnants of a tear from the corner of her eyes as she rose. "A prayer in any language is beautiful."

He nodded. "How's he holding up?" He braced his hands against the bed frame and crossed his feet, looking down on Piers' moribund form.

"We just have to wait."

Chris tilted his head toward her. "And you?"

She shook her head slowly, then suddenly bursting with realization, turned to face him with an apologetic expression.

"You know, I never even asked you how you were?"

Chris perked a brow. He was fighting a troubling headache; he was sleep deprived and sporting a fading cut along his jaw line from shaving with a straight razor. He had gotten up at five to meet with a mandated grief counselor to talk about feelings he didn't know he had. He had met with a counselor before, with a different, much prettier doctor with legs for days and a professionalism that his flirtations could not penetrate. When he accepted that her legs weren't open for business he stopped the sessions cold turkey despite biting protests from the agency. He didn't need her anymore. Kijuju was over. He wouldn't bother to tell Sheva any of that, considering her eyes were brimming with tears already.

He turned his attention to Piers again. "I'm fine."

She knew he was lying immediately but she nodded, vacantly satisfied. Her mind was with Piers. Still, it did not stall her from daring to press closer to him. When there was no distance between the friends, she leaned a degree onto his solid frame, an action to which he simply glanced at her with consideration before swallowing down the rest of his coffee. She was trying to comfort him.

"I'll take his gear back to the armory," he volunteered.

"Thanks, Chris. For all you do."

If he had been younger, faster, Piers wouldn't have been in the situation he was in now. Packing on thirty pounds of muscle seemed like a burden every year he got older. If it was for nothing else but aesthetics then he had at least accomplished something.

He nodded. In his mind he had gathered her under his arm to console her but he never made a move.

"I'm sorry, Sheva. I wish none of this was happening to either of you."

He felt her shrug. "Don't be. I understand the nature of this career."

He moved from her and bent to pick up the gear bag on the floor. Every muscle in his lower back screamed in protest. He rose with a grunt and slung the bag over his shoulder. Sheva took notice of the band aid in the bend of his elbow. He and several other agents had come by to donate blood in good show. She had seen him there earlier, still in dress standard, when she arrived at the hospital. She was too taken with Piers to bother with him but she had noticed him asleep sitting upright while the nurse drew his blood. He had looked worn, troubled in his sleep, nearly deflated in the little arm chair that barely held his splay, an arm outstretched and connected to a collection bag while his chin rested on his chest.

"Call me if you need me, okay? Even if you think you don't."

"Okay," she said softly, as he started past her.

"I'm not being polite, either," he warned from over his shoulder. She never turned around. She never responded. Her full attention had been absorbed into the shambles of the man before her the moment he had breached the door into the hallway. He hadn't gone far when he heard a whimper that made him stop in his tracks. It was Sheva's. It was as if she had been waiting for him to leave the room before she started to cry so heavily, it cemented him in place. Either he would go back and comfort her, or press on and ignore it. Before he could make a decision he was moving toward the exit, distancing himself from her sobs because the more he listened to it, the heavier the gear bag became.


	5. Precursory Sin

He had only been deployed for four months of his military career. The first day he had met the second man in his two man sniper unit, his spotter Adrian Del La Torre, was the last. They had barely exchanged more than a few polite words. Piers had just lifted the spoon to his mouth when they were rounded up from the chow hall and loaded onto a humvee. It was a blazing 110 degrees in the shade. The desert sand around him looked like mounds of fire rippling mirages from a distance. The closer they got to the firefight, the louder the reports from enemy gunfire came. He had scanned the map expertly memorizing the topography, planning a route to the vantage point in the center of a seized village. The minute the humvee stopped and Del La Torre stood up to leap out, his head exploded like a pressurized watermelon and bathed Piers and his team in red shards of human flesh and debris.

Piers was in such a state of shock that he froze. He would have eaten the next round from the enemy sniper if his team mates didn't have the foresight to drag him down to cover.

When he regained his senses, he fired the kill shot awkwardly angled from under the protection of the humvee tail bed, seven hundred yards away. Del La Torre's lifeless body lay in a heap just outside his field of vision. He refused to look at him.

Years later, a thousand yard shot won him the North American Sniper Competition and set him squarely in the sights of the BSAA. Nailing the shot was hard enough under the best of conditions but he shouldered the heavy fifty caliber rifle and nailed the target before half the competition had dialed in. The only impressed face he remembered was that of Chris Redfield; a man of great presence with a grip like a vise.

Piers shifted through these chronological memories in a parallel plane, snatching at bits and pieces of his life as he transversed this ethereal word. Oftentimes, his mind would bring him back to Sheva.

He remembered being tangled up under her sheets, watching a steady rain beat softly against her bedroom window. Languid, he hadn't caught more sleep than what nodding off had afforded him in the last twenty-four hour mission. He should have gone home and gone to bed but his heart and his desire steered him to her apartment. He liked it there. Her walls were a warm orange, deep like the sunset, splattered with a collage of friends he'd never meet, places he'd only been to vicariously through her intense descriptions.

Massaging fingers slid through his hair. Lips fell upon lips. Arms entangled. He had asked her to move in with him. She purred her consent against his mouth without breaking contact.

He felt weightless with her.

It was these memories that dug his fingers into the sheets beneath him, clutching the hospital mattress as though it were her pillowy form, grunting in protest that the silicone mouthpiece that covered his face was not the flavourful embrace of her lips.

Sheva fell forward, allowing the parts of hair to fall between the rows of her fingers. She swept it back and tacked it in place with a hair clip. She kicked off her shoes and sucked her legs up underneath her oversized sweater and crammed herself into the bedside chair that had been her home away from home for the last few days. Though it pained her to surrender to the tableside calendar and tear off _another_ day without Piers waking, she did so with defiance, choosing to acknowledge the day only as it was ending. He had been fighting a septic fever since day broke.

A polite knock on the door stole her attention.

"Come in" she invited, popping out of her sweater.

Chris peeked in before sliding in and closing the door softly behind him. She smiled brilliantly at him.

"Hey," he greeted half distracted, surprising her with a cup of coffee. She barely had it out of his hands before he practically collapsed into the seat on the other side of Piers, melting into a slouch. His nose was stuck in his phone.

"Hey, do you still get these updates?" She knew what he was talking about. Edonia had been in a yellow alert all week. They didn't pertain to her exactly anymore, but they still posed a threat to the ones she cared about.

"I do." And they still gave her anxiety. The last time her phone blared a red alert, her stomach dropped to her knees. She had literally just sat down from a long day helping TerraSave salvage Kijuju. The mission hadn't defeated her; the aftermath had. She resigned promptly from Operations, much to the shock of Josh, who admitted he was both relieved and disappointed.

Chris left it at that. He had never said a word about her resignation. He understood perfectly why she did what she did; he just lacked the courage to quit. The next best thing was a transfer of power. But Piers had to recover first.

"Chris, thanks for the coffee, but can I share a secret with you?"

He perked a tired brow and tucked his phone into his pant pocket. "What?"

"I hate coffee," she admitted, taking a thankful sip from the cup anyway. Her eyes flew open in surprise that it was tea, considerately sweetened.

Chris grinned at her, enlivening his tired expression. "I know."

She blanched, glad that she had kept the lights off for Piers' comfort. It served to hide her inflamed features also, irritated from petulant crying at the slightest provocation from Piers who often moaned, sighed or made glottal reports, though he was no more aware of what he was doing than an invalid. Still she drew from that well of hope only to come up dry and disappointed.

She set the cup down beside her chair and whispered her conversation to him.

"What are you doing on this side of town at this hour?"

"Checking in," he replied in kind through a yawn. He swept his eyes over Piers, checking for any discernable signs of change from the days before but there were none to note. He remained asleep, blanketed by faint stripes of ambient lighting outside his unit window.

"I should be checking on _you_."

He blinked. "What do you mean?"

"I work with intel, Chris. I know you've been seeing a counselor."

Chris sat up slowly in his chair, raking his hands against his pants. It was true. He could hardly finish his detailed report without his brain hiccupping through the hysterics of the night Piers was shot. He had been through a lot that tested the integrity of his mind, but this incident was different. It was the first time he had ever killed anything that wasn't already _dead._ At the time, he had given little thought to the alternative; hesitating at the trigger to interrogate, intimidate, or arrest the customer. Alternatively, both he and Piers would probably have been dead.

"Yeah," he admitted through a sigh, his eyes trailing to the floor. A light went out in them as he collected his thoughts. He wondered how embarrassed he should feel about it.

"It's okay, Chris," She soothed. "I've seen many. Kijuju, remember?"

He brought his attention back to her. He could faintly see her dismissing the tension he put upon himself with a smile.

"I _know_ what I did was right. I just don't understand it. At least what happened in Kijuju and with those other outbreaks…those people were already gone."

She nodded. "My life needed fixing long before I met you in Africa. I was a guerilla, remember? Among many men that were hardly satisfied by their drugs alone." She shot a dim wink at him despite the grim implication.

"Unfortunately, it _does_ get easier after the first time. I hope you never get to experience that truth. I hope I never will again. So I really do understand you, if you ever feel like you need someone to relate to other than some nodding old fool who only pretends to align himself with your feelings. I'm not saying don't see a counselor but despite what's happening now, I am here for you too. That is, if you need me. Or want me."

"Wow." Was all he could mutter to rival her poignancy. It was all he had.

"Ironic that I'm dating a sniper, I know," she added with a grin. Chris chuckled softly. She smiled harder at the sound of his amusement, proud of herself for lifting his mood a touch, if only briefly. Usually temperate, Chris grinning was something like petals on a flower unfurling. It added another level of attraction. She took another swallow from the tea.

Chris mulled over her invitation. Sometimes, he did want her. It was selfish; it was dastardly; it was human. Piers made a sound like a cough, as though he had sensed his intentions in the moment his mind had drifted, but as always and as usual, nothing came of it. He looked from him to Sheva, whose shadowy features dipped again.

It occurred to him that he had no idea what it felt like to be an ailing lover. The closest he came to a glimpse of that madness came from pining over the assumed death of Jill Valentine. It felt as though he was holding his breath for years. From the moment Piers collapsed, he had rehearsed how he would tell his family that he'd bled out en route to a hospital in the dredges of Rio. But he hadn't. He wondered what kernel of life he held fast to when his lights went out, fading away into his own body as they flew with the RIT team across the ocean back home.

Had he thought of Sheva?

There hadn't been a moment when she wasn't devoting her free time to his bedside. The first day he'd found her on her knees, vigilant, patient and hopeful, he came to an abrupt stop at the threshold to absorb her. Yes, he had come to see Piers. But he hadn't expected to be distracted by that scene as she intimated with her Creator in foreign eloquence, a prayer that ran fluidly from lips glossed with a cherry tainted balm. He had seen Sheva a thousand times. He didn't know he was attracted to her. Maybe he ignored it for Piers' sake.

She settled her chin on her fist, staring longingly at Piers. She rolled her eyes at how bipolar the situation was making her then said resolutely to Chris, "Would you mind driving me home? I left my car at HQ." If she didn't force herself to leave now, she would torture herself until morning with every flicker and twitch that Piers unwittingly teased her with.

Chris shook his head. "No. Not at all."

She stood up and gathered her things at his bedside. Chris stood up stiffly as she did so, hating how a simple utterance from Piers had stirred her emotionally for the worse. He watched her kiss him softly before moving toward the door, Chris a pace behind her.

He pulled in the door softly after them, stealing one last look at Piers' figure, alive by the mercy of the wires that entangled him. Shutting the door felt like closing the lid to his coffin.


End file.
